ЭРҮҮЛ МЭНДИЙН СОЦИАЛЬ ХҮЧИН ЗҮЙЛИЙН ТАЛААРХ СОЦИОЛОГИЧДЫН ҮЗЭЛ БАРИМТЛАЛ БА ӨНӨӨГИЙН НӨХЦӨЛ

Abstract

Throughout history, human beings have been interested in and deeply concerned with the effects of the social environment on the health of individuals and the groups to which they belong. Today it is clear that social factors play a critically important role in health, as the greatest threats to the health and well-being of individuals stem largely from unhealthy lifestyles and high-risk behavior. Sociology’s interest in medicine as a unique system of human social behavior and medicine’s recognition that sociology can help health practitioners to better understand their patients and provide improved forms of health care, have begun to bring about a convergence of mutual interest between the two disciplines. Unlike law, religion, politics, economics, and other social institutions, medicine was ignored by sociology’s founders in the late nineteenth century because it did not appear to shape the structure and nature of society. Karl Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels (1973) linked the poor health of the English working class to capitalism in a treatise published in 1845, and. Emile Durkheim (1951) analyzed European suicide rates in 1897. However, Durkheim, Marx, Max Weber, and other major

classical sociological theorists did not concern themselves with the role of medicine in society.

However, a critical event occurred in 1951 that began the reorientation of American medical sociology in a theoretical direction. This was the appearance, in 1951, of Talcott Parsons’s book The Social System, This book, written to explain a relatively complex structural-functionalist model of society, in which social systems are linked to corresponding systems of personality and culture, contained Parsons’s concept of the sick role. Unlike other major social theorists preceding him, Parsons formulated an analysis of the function of medicine in his view of society.In developing his concept of the sick role, Parsons linked his ideas to those of the two most important classical theorists in sociologyEmile Durkheim (1858-1917) of France and Max Weber (1864-1920) of German. Parsons was the first to demonstrate the controlling function of medicine in a large social system, and he did so in the context of classical sociological theory.

Without academic legitimacy and the subsequent participation of such well-known, mainstream academic sociologists in the 1960s, such as Robert Merton, Howard Becker, and Erving Goffman, all of whom published research in the field, medical sociology would lack the professional credentials and stature it currently has in both academic and applied settings.

A growing convergence among medical sociology and the general discipline of sociology is emerging. This situation is aided by the fact that all sociologists share the same training and methodological strategies in their approach to research. Theoretical foundations common throughout sociology are being increasingly reflected in medical sociological work, while many health issues investigated by medical sociologists call for knowledge of social processes outside of the sociomedical realm. For example, studies of health reform require consideration of the larger sociological literature on social change, power, the political process, socioeconomic factors, and connections between social institutions, and research on job-related stress demands familiarity with occupational structure. Therefore, as Bernice Pescosolido and Jeanne Kronenfeld point out, medical sociologists “need to understand the general nature of social change and social institutions—to recognize, describe, and draw from these changes and institutions implications for health, illness, and healing.” Thus, much of the future success of medical sociology is linked to its ability to utilize the findings and perspectives of the larger discipline in its work and to contribute, in turn, to general sociology.